Writer. Blogger. Researcher?

📚 Writing a novel is only about 50% actual writing. 📚

Say what? Come on, now! That’s crazy talk!

No, it’s true. At least for me, it is. I spend a significant portion of my dedicated novel time doing things falling outside of the strict writing category. Waking up the computer. Getting supporting documents opened up. Remembering where I left off. Getting into the right mindset. Thinking. I won’t count petting the dog or making French Press coffee, but I do those too. ☕️🐕

The biggest non-writing activity by far is research. If someone had told me a year ago that some days I would spend as much time looking things up as I do putting words on virtual paper, I would have laughed at them. That’s ridiculous! Writing is writing! You type, you edit it, redo, edit some more, and then it’s ready for the professionals. One hundred percent, it’s about getting words on paper.

But no one told me. I had to come to this conclusion on my own.

🥓 My first book—Where The Hell Is My Bacon?—was nonfiction and I lived the story told within. I didn’t have to manage a ton of research. What little I did was fairly unspectacular, such as when I looked up the Rocky Top Beer-BBQ & Grill in Jackson, Michigan to verify the “Billy Burger,” which had an honorable mention in the book. I wanted to make sure I described it accurately, so I checked the restaurant’s online menu.

Fun fact: I just now looked up the Rocky Top Beer-BBQ & Grill menu and they no longer list the Billy Burger. DOH! I think it’s called the Beer Cheese Bacon Burger now, check it out before the name changes again! 🍔

The bottom line is, I did not have to do much heavy research on my first book. It’s hard to get it wrong with bacon.

My second book, however, is proving to be an entirely different experience.

I’m currently writing my first novel. Okay, it’s technically not my first novel. I have two or three partially-finished works that I whipped out over 25 years ago when I was a young whipper-snapper working as a nanny in Bergen County, New Jersey. The family I lived with had an Apple IIe sitting idle in the basement. I had done a lot of writing by hand over the years but the computer opened a whole new opportunity in putting words on “paper.” I bought a few floppy disks, some word processing software, and got to work.

Flash forward a quarter decade later, and somewhere gathering dust in the bottom of an old dresser are such works as The Farmhouse Story, about a young woman escaping an abusive husband in rural Michigan during the 30’s (or late 1800’s depending on my whim); and The Time Travel Story about a single mother separated from her son during a mysterious storm that transports both of them back in time to the Middle Ages.  Maybe I’ll dredge them up someday, if for nothing else than to give them some more 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓿𝓮 titles.

While those unfinished dreams lie dormant in a dark drawer, I am currently working in earnest on my first novel for publication: Aunt Frannie and the She-Shed Itch. AFATSS-ITCH, as I like to call it, falls into the category Fiction: Contemporary Humor with an underlying love story to coax it into the Romance genre as well.  🌹 Although it is set mostly in the current era, there are several chapters that take place throughout the 1980s (aka “the best decade ever”). This is where it begins to get fun. While I did grow up in the ‘80s (and the characters are loosely based on members of my own hilarious family), I still had to do a lot of research. It’s not as easy as it seems, even with the Internet at hand. What did people do 20 years ago before all this information was available at the click of a button? The horror!

As an example, let’s take a look at phones. Phones play a big part in a chapter set in 1983. In one scene, a young mother named Renee Gurpka collapses outside of her bathroom. As Renee was the only adult home at the time, her 10-year-old daughter and a visiting neighbor girl call the police for help. That should be easy enough. I lived through the ‘80s! We had lots of phones…I got this!

But then I started to remember all of the many models we had during that time: rotary dial, push button, wall phone, desk phone; the one with the long cord that you would stretch through three rooms around seven or eight pieces of furniture; and that annoying desk phone with the short cable that wouldn’t even allow you to pull it onto your lap so you could sit on the couch while you talk. We even had a crank wall phone (and it worked!). White phones, green phones, black phones, tan phones…and what was that little circle in the middle of the rotary phone called?

We had a party line for years—for you young’uns, that’s where you share a traditional phone line with someone else (I know…creepy!). If it rang once, it was for Mr. and Mrs. Mulligan down the road. If it rang twice, it was for our own household and we would answer. If I had to make an outgoing call, maybe to my friend Kathy, I might pick up the receiver and hear my neighbor Margie Mulligan having a conversation with her best friend Jackie about Jackie’s lazy husband Gary. Margie would hear me pick up the phone and if I didn’t hang up soon enough (because maybe it was some juicy gossip!), she would yell at me to stop eavesdropping and threaten to tell my mother.

I can only imagine how frustrating it was for our party line partners to share their phone services with a family of seven mischievous children. I don’t recall if we had the party line into the early ‘80’s but I did learn in my research that party lines were not completely phased out until 1991.

There were a lot of phone options throughout the ‘80s but for the life of me, I didn’t know for sure where they all fit. Was push-button dialing available in 1983? Did we have a wall-mounted phone then or was that later? Surely we weren’t on cordless that soon! Where would the phone be located? That might depend on the model.

What about 911? Was it available where the scene takes place, in rural southern lower Michigan, that year? I had just assumed it was. Hasn’t 911 been around forever? The answer is, no! Turns out, it was NOT available in rural southern lower Michigan in 1983. That one blew me away. In fact, 911 was not widely available at all back then, though it was used in some big cities like Chicago. Only about 50 percent of the United States had 911 even into the late ‘80s.

After all this research into phones, I could then finally set the stage for the chapter: Valerie (the neighbor girl) and Jules (Renee’s daughter), use a tan, wall-mounted push-button (“touch-tone”) phone, dialing 0 for the Operator for help. As an alternative, they might have looked up the number for the police in the Yellow Pages Phone Book, which had local emergency numbers printed on the front or in the first few pages of the directory. Or, the number for police and fire might have been jotted down on the little slip of paper underneath the keypad right on the phone.

Later in that same chapter, when Renee’s son Boone needs to call his dad, he must go next door to Valerie’s house to use the phone. It wasn’t like today with everyone having their own cell phone plus a work phone plus a computer plus an Apple watch (how did we ever manage?). Boone calls his father’s work phone number, which he took from a piece of paper that was stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. THAT hasn’t changed much.

Oh, and that little round piece of paper in the middle of a rotary dial phone? That’s the dial plate.

I took a long, nostalgic trip down Memory Lane with the phone research. I had a similar adventure with station wagons. A different chapter set in 1987 included a station wagon I modeled after the four-wheeled boat I rode in with my own big family. It had the classic wooden side panels and sat eight of us total, in three rows. I usually sat in the very back seat because only two could fit there. Even if I got stuck with my pesky (at the time) younger brother Steve, there was a good-sized hump between us. All of the rows of seats faced forward. This is important to note, because many models around that time had rear-facing back seats. So that was the first obstacle. Also, the station wagon was a popular style. There were a LOT of options to go through. I finally settled on an ’81 Chevy Caprice wagon.  Classic.

In the chapter set in 1983, Renee Gurpka collapses after having a stroke. This is what elicits the call to the police I talked about earlier. First, I had to ask myself, would a woman in her late-30s even have a stroke? Isn’t this an old-people thing? Since my husband had several mini-strokes in his early-40s after a car accident, I figured it was possible. Turns out, it’s not entirely uncommon. About 25 percent of major strokes happen in people under 65 years old, and an estimated 10 percent under the age of 45. They can be caused or exacerbated by a number of things, including smoking (which the character did), diabetes, being on birth control pills, or even a brain aneurysm. I didn’t necessarily need to explain every aspect of the stroke to the reader, but I needed to make sure that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

In 1987, Valerie’s mother Ellen Winter is killed in an automobile accident. The autopsy revealed she had alcohol and Prozac in her system. Was Prozac even prescribed in 1987? I found that it was introduced for medical use in 1986 and took off like a rocket. Prozac and alcohol—even one drink—can result in extreme drowsiness. A car accident under these conditions would not be hard to imagine at all.

What were reasonable hairstyles and clothing in 1983 and 1987? I grew up in the era, so you’d think fashion would have been a no-brainer. But what a 16-year-old would wear was entirely different than what a man or woman in their late-30s/early 40s would. I didn’t picture Prozac-drowsy Ellen Winter sporting a neon green and pink oversized sweatshirt with the collar cut off (a la Flashdance). Certainly not coupled with pegged jeans, legwarmers, and a black bow the size of a football on the side of her head.

What about cigarettes? Valerie’s mom was a smoker, as was the main character Aunt Frannie for a time. What would two 40ish women be smoking in the 80’s? I had dabbled in smoking myself from the late ‘80s until around 2001. I was into Virginia Slims back then, but were they available in the early ‘80s? What would Ellen Winter have been smoking in her dark living room when Boone Gurpka ran over to use her phone to call his father when his mother collapsed? Virginia Slims were introduced in 1978 and their market share and growth was good through the mid-‘80s. They are also 100mm long (vs the standard cigarette size of 85mm), so Ellen could easily have a VS in one hand with a 2-inch ash hanging off the end without any problems. Scene set.

The main character, Frannie Gurpka, worked at a place called Plastigage in Jackson, Michigan. I modeled Frannie after my own mom in many ways, and my mom worked at this place back in the ‘70s. I had to make sure it existed in 1983 and 1987 because I referenced it a few times. Lo and behold, it still exists today! I remember my mother telling me it was a plexiglass manufacturer. I’m not sure what the official term is for the clear plastic nowadays, but that’s what they still do. The business has been around for 65 years.

 There were so many more. Faygo grape soda pop was Boone’s favorite. Did it exist in the 80s? Why yes indeed. In fact, grape was one of the three original flavors of the carbonated beverage founded by Russian immigrants in Detroit, Michigan in 1907.

When did Stephen King publish his horror novel The Stand? That was in 1978, so I was correct when Valerie noted, “Even though The Stand had been out for almost 10 years, it was still very much in demand in our little berg.” It played nicely into a scene where Valerie and Boone bond over Stephen King on the school bus in 1987.  

There were countless others. What I have come to realize, is that a LOT of the writing experience is about research. I would have been shocked if someone had told me this before I started my novel, but now it has become a regular part of my routine. And I’ve learned a ton!

What interesting things have you learned in your writing research?